


A Dollar Short

by fourfreedoms



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, M/M, civilian!Nate, falling in love in high school
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-23
Updated: 2011-11-19
Packaged: 2017-10-26 06:51:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/280033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourfreedoms/pseuds/fourfreedoms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brad comes home from a tour and runs into Nate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He sees the kid a lot when they get to go into Carlsbad. Brad’s been going to school here since the 7th grade, but until the start of this year, he never saw him at all. He doesn’t know why he notices him everywhere. The kid’s pretty unremarkable looking. And yet, every time Brad runs into him—in the record store, at the movies, at the fucking all-night Denny’s at 4 AM with a bunch of other wholesome looking teens—he can’t look away. He even finds him running in the park one time when Brad’s walking through.

The expression on his face is so intent, like he’s on another planet. Brad knows that feeling. He swallows and looks away.

The next time Brad gets a free weekend he goes by himself to the bookstore and spots the kid, back against a shelf in the science fiction section reading a mass market paperback. Brad inhales and it’s like the kid hears it because he looks up suddenly and smiles. He closes the book, index finger holding the page and disappears among the sections. Brad pushes him from his mind, looking through the new titles on the shelves. He doesn’t get much chance to read books for pleasure, but he likes to, sometimes.

Brad runs into the kid again at the register. He’s paying for the sci-fi book and two other heavier volumes, Brad thinks he sees Hemingway’s name and Noam Chomsky.

The cashier says, “That’ll be $36.50.” The kid digs in his pants, and comes up with $35.50.

“Shit,” he says, pulling out his pockets for any loose change.

“If you don’t have it, you’ll have to choose which book you don’t want,” the cashier says, annoyed. She ticks her fingers against the side of the register.

The kid stares at the pile of books, teeth sunk into his lip.

Brad pauses for a long moment and then pulls out a dollar and says, “I got it.” He leans over the kid’s shoulder to hand the dollar over and the kid turns his head to look at him at the exact same moment. His nose brushes over Brad’s cheek and Brad barely keeps himself from jumping.

“Thank you,” he says, softly. Brad never realized, but his eyes are green. The brightest green he’s ever seen. The cashier puts the books in a bag and hands it over and then looks at Brad expectantly. It takes him a minute to realize she wants him to put his own collection of purchases down on the counter so that she can ring them up. The kid lingers off to the side, though Brad doesn’t know why.

When Brad gets his bag and goes to the door the kid accompanies him. He holds the door open and holds his hand out to shake on the other side. “I’m Nate.”

He nods and says curtly, “Brad.”

“Thanks again,” Nate tells him. He hesitates and then says, “I work at Crème De Café and if you want, I can get you a free cup of coffee in thanks.”

“I don’t drink coffee.”

“Soda then?”

Brad stops walking and Nate stops with him. He waits, considering. “Okay.”

Nate cocks his head, eyes crinkling at the corners. “Great.”

They walk the three blocks to the café in relative silence until Nate says, “So you’re at the academy, huh.”

“How’d you guess?”

“That haircut,” Nate says, touching the tip of his tongue to his teeth, completely ignoring Brad's sarcasm.

Brad nods. “Yeah. I guess it would give it away.”

“What’s that like?”

“Cutting my hair frequently? Tedious.”

“No, going to the academy,” Nate replies. They’ve reached the café, and Nate once again pulls the door open for him like Brad’s a lady. He shoots Nate a look and then goes through. He can tell Nate had to hold back a smile.

Nate waves him toward a table and says, “Sit down, I’ll bring you a drink. What would you like?”

“Water is fine.” Nate raises his brows and Brad sighs. “Iced tea then.”

Nate dips his head in acknowledgement and vaults over an empty section of the counter. Brad watches him talk and laugh with the barista on duty, a pretty girl with a short pixieish haircut, as he pours Brad an iced tea and makes an espresso for himself. Brad feels like he’s watching something intimate. He wonders of Nate and that girl are together. He’s not sure why he cares.

Nate returns a few moments later, face flushed. “So you didn’t answer my question,” he says.

Brad shrugs. “I’m joining the marines when I graduate.” He doesn’t mention that when his parents first enrolled him, he was assigned the most PT of any student in his year previous or after.

Nate lifts his chin. “So I guess you like it.”

Brad shrugs and takes a sip of the iced tea. It’s a little on the strong side and he makes a face at it. Nate wordlessly hands over a packet of sugar.

Brad realizes it’s his turn to talk. “Where are you going after you graduate?”

“From high school?” Nate says, above his little cup of espresso. “I just got into Dartmouth Early Decision.”

“Shoulda guessed, you have a patina of Ivy League hippie all over.”

Nate salutes with his cup and then opens up Brad’s bag. “Neal Stephenson, Cory Doctorow, Ken Scholes…” he reads each other title as he lays it out on the table. “Well, you just look like a massive dork.”

Brad snorts. He realizes he likes Nate. A lot. Nate looks down at his watch and starts. “I have to go. Thanks again.” He scoops his bag of books up and gets to his feet. He says, looking at him through half-lidded eyes. “See you around?”

Brad pauses for a moment and then says, “Sure.”

He doesn’t see Nate for weeks and weeks around town after that. He thinks about going into the coffee shop, because obviously Nate has to be there _some_ time, but Brad just can’t bring himself. Instead, he throws himself into his exercises and training and goes home for the first time during the school year since he was in the 10th grade. The other kids go all the time, but Brad hasn’t wanted to for a long time.

He doesn’t feel any better there. The lack of structure is somehow disquieting and upsetting. And he likes his family, but they don’t really get him anymore. He knows his mom regrets sending him to the academy, even though they wanted to straighten him out. It worked, frankly. Maybe not the way they wanted, but that isn’t his fault.

He goes back to campus feeling relieved. The next weekend his mom asks if he wants to come home again, but he tells her he’s too busy. Instead he goes to a house party of one of the day students with a few friends intent on getting blindly drunk. Or at least that’s the plan.

“This party blows,” he says to Ray, staring at the crowd of his yearmates attempting to grind and guzzle large amounts of beer with the students from the girl’s school.

“There are girls here, dude,” Ray replies. “What more can you want?”

Brad shoots him a look. “I’m going to go.”

Ray looks prepared to whine at him, but he switches tactics abruptly. “Suit yourself,” he says and dives into the crowd. Brad rolls his eyes and pushes his way to the front door. It’s a warm night. He stares up at the sky for a moment and then decides to go for a walk down the quiet residential streets. Unbidden, his brain turns to Nate.

There’s another party going on only a few blocks away, the door opens and a bunch of loaded teens from the local high school stumble out, laughing. Brad shoves his hands into his pockets and shakes his head, intending to walk past. But somebody calls out his name. He turns his head and sees Nate, swaying drunkenly, balanced against somebody’s shoulder. The person almost drops him right on the sidewalk and Brad blows out a breath, walking over and dragging Nate’s arm over his shoulder so that he can stand upright.

Nate smiles, right into his face. “That was nice of you...” He rocks on his feet and says, “Want to go for a walk with me?”

Brad holds back a snort. “Sure. Where’s home?”

“Can’t go home. Not like this.” Brad sighs and Nate shoots him a coy look. “Don’t be upset…I am…I think about you all the time.”

Brad freezes, cold going down his spine. They’ve walked a significant distance away from the party, but Brad still looks around to see if anybody is close to them. Just as well because Nate follows it up with a dirty bomb. “Are you gay?”

Brad chokes and Nate reaches up and grips his bicep hard. “You’re just…you look at me all the time.”

Brad hadn’t realized Nate noticed. He tries to disentangle himself from Nate’s grasp, but Nate tightens his grip on Brad’s upper arm. “I wouldn’t have noticed…if I hadn’t been looking too.”

“I’m not ga—”

Nate interrupts him with a kiss. He’s sloppy with drunkeness, barely holding himself up, but the kiss has surprising finesse. Brad wants to thrust him away, punch him in the head. What the hell is Nate thinking?

He’s never…he’s never…but then he’s pushing Nate back into the rear door of a parked mini-van, thrusting a thigh between his legs. Nate’s eyelashes brush over his cheek when he changes the angle of the kiss, biting at his lower lip. Brad’s heart constricts, he feels a little bit like somebody just told him his mother died, but he can’t stop himself. He wants to lose himself, even as he knows he absolutely can’t.

Nate breathes hard against his mouth and ruts their hips together. It’s too much. Brad’s not ready for that. He steps back, putting a little distance between them. He keeps a hand on Nate’s shoulder to hold him up. Nate’s head nods on his shoulder, but he maintains eye contact.

“I’m not gay either…” he says finally. “But—” he starts.

“I’m joining the marines,” Brad replies, voice breaking.

Nate stares at him for a long moment, suddenly seeming to sober up. He picks up Brad’s other hand, threading their fingers together. Brad looks down at it. His skin is much darker than Nate's whose complexion clearly burns rather than tans. “Alright,” Nate says, like he’s comforting a small child. Brad tightens his fingers around Nate’s and then drops his hand.


	2. Years Later...

It’s his fifth year in the Corps and his platoon is stateside for the first time in seven months. Things like hanging out at bars and driving with the air-conditioner on while blasting KC101 still feel like luxuries. So do beers served by bottle-blonde bartenders. It’s still light out, but it’s that kind of day. The kind of day where you want something just because it's possible. They pile out of Poke’s gen-u-ine Lowrider in front of the Haunted Head. It wasn't Brad's first choice, but Ray’s being a whiny bitch, and he’s also the loudest, which pretty much means any time he’s got his head set on something, they all have to go along or shout louder.

Brad ultimately doesn’t care enough to raise an objection. As long as he can have a Bud and a couple of shots of tequila, he’s happy.

Poke’s car backfires as he’s parallel parking, and while Ray and Kocher burst out laughing, Brad snorts and turns away, heading for the door. He runs straight into somebody walking down the street.

“Shit, sorry!” the guy says, putting a steadying hand on Brad’s arm as if someone as tall as he is ever needs steadying. He looks down at the hand and wonders just what this guy will do when he shakes it off. The hand drops away before he can even do anything about it. “Holy…Brad?”

Back here he doesn’t have to put a lot of attention into things that don’t matter—like assholes who slam into him on the sidewalk and then hang out in his personal space--but he gives his attention now.

It’s the last person he expects. He finds himself staring into laughing green eyes and remembering over-brewed iced tea and feeling like a voyeur every time he came across Nate in the park. He still feels like a voyeur and Nate’s staring right back at him. There’s just a part of him that is and always will be the widest open door Brad’s ever seen.

Also, Brad is really shit at this whole ‘ohmygod, I knew you from another life’ business. He’s pretty sure it shows.

“Hi,” he says. He takes the moment to study Nate. His face is exactly the same, like a day hasn’t passed, but he’s taller now. Solid. Like somebody who’s gotten used to putting a steadying hand out when he accidentally runs into people.

“Hi,” Nate replies. “How’ve you been?”

“Alright,” Brad replies. He’s not good at this ‘shooting the shit’ business either. But— “Just finished a tour, glad to be home.” Nate nods like he understands, although he can’t possibly. “You?”

“Just home for a little bit. My sister’s getting married.”

“Cool, well—” Brad answers, looking back over his shoulder at Ray, Poke, and Kocher. They’re all staring at him.

Nate knows him too well. He interprets the look and says, “I have to run, but it was good to see you. Looks like the corp’s been good to you.”

“Yeah.”

Nate smiles again and then moves past him. Brad wonders if everybody feels like this when they deal with Nate. Opened almost as wide as he is, like he’s not just a doorway, but also the wind slamming it open.

“Who was that guy?” Ray asks, tracking Nate’s walk down Tremont with his eyes. Kocher and Poke have already gone ahead, but Ray has always been canny.

“Just somebody I knew in high school,” Brad replies.

Ray says, “Hmm,” like he understands. But just like Nate can’t understand how exactly Brad is glad to be back, Ray can’t possibly understand the place in his life where he knew Nate. He doesn’t hold it against either of them.

*

After two weeks back in Pendleton, he knows he needs to get off-base accommodations. After a failed day of apartment hunting, he finds himself only a block away from Crème De Café. He doesn’t know what possesses him to go inside, but before he's even really made up his mind about it, he's shoving the door open. When he finds Nate inside, Brad seriously has to consider if his Nate Fick sonar from days of yore has come back like a persistent disease. He’s leaning up against the dessert case and talking to the woman Brad remembers vaguely as the owner. If Nate’s still checking in with her five years later, this job really must’ve meant a lot to him.

He considers what he knows about Nate. That he liked sci-fi books and posh literature with too many adverbs in it. That he’s still coming back to this café. That he was bound for Dartmouth. He knows nothing. How could he? He only knew him for two seconds during the second semester of his senior year of high school.

Nate turns his head like he can sense Brad is there. He says something to the owner and she hands him a sweating bottle of water. Nate tosses it to him.

Brad looks down at it, blinking. “What if I wanted a Half-Caf Americano?”

“You don’t drink coffee,” Nate says simply. He gestures to an empty table. “Sit with me.”

Brad has places to be. But ultimately, it wasn’t even a question in his mind. He twists the top off his water and pulls out a chair. “What have you been up to?”

“Just finishing my first year of grad school.”

“Oh yes? Harvard? Princeton? Yale?”

“Shut up,” Nate replies. “Berkeley.”

“I know that people say this a lot, but that would actually have been my next guess. I simply forgot to factor in your hopeless naïveté.”

Nate laughs and shakes his head. “Still kind of a jerk, huh?”

“Oh no, I’m way more of a jerk now.”

“I’m glad you’re back,” Nate says, suddenly. Brad knows he means, ‘I’m glad you’re alive. I’m glad you’re whole.’ For two supposedly not gay people, they’re acting like pretty big fags.

*

Ray asks about him after he makes the mistake of mentioning that he ran into Nate again.

“He obviously didn’t go to military school, he had that soft squishy look of civilian no-nothings.”

Brad wants to tell Ray that he’s wrong. Nothing about Nate is soft. He’s deceptive that way. He’s open, he is yielding, he’s not soft. It’s funny that it took the corps to teach him the difference.

“Local high school, hung out with him a few times.”

“Aww, Romeo + Juliet, a match made in heaven, cursed by hell.”

“Yes, Ray, exactly like that,” Brad tells him, “There were duels and everything. And then I killed you and you never spoke again.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not how the Bard wrote it, ‘And then James Ray Person doth died randomly here without even getting one last titty-fuck. Verily, ‘twas all so tragic.’”

“Isn’t it hath?”

“What?”

“Ray Person hath died!”

Ray stares at him. “How the fuck should I know?” And then he started up his bullshit one room school-house routine, even though, somehow, Ray’s upside down and fucked backwards mother had still managed to get him into the best public school in the state.

*

He does see Nate everywhere. It's unclear to him how Nate can be attending his sister’s wedding and be everywhere Brad is at the same time. But he's managing. He’s in the grocery store that Brad stops at to pick up paper plates and two cases of beer for Poke’s barbecue, he’s at the movies when Ray convinces him to see some dumb horror flick, he’s running at the beach when Brad goes to surf. It shouldn't hit him like a sucker punch to the gut every time it happens, but he never stops being surprised.

After meeting up with some of the guys for a round of drinks and pool and miraculously running into Nate right outside the bar, he asks, “Do you have a tracking chip or something?”

Nate spread his palms. “I’m not the recon marine.”

Brad’s a little bit drunk, a little bit unguarded and unwary now that his life doesn’t require that constant effort. “I wanted to see you, and you appeared.” It might be better to revise that to a lot bit drunk.

“Just like magic,” Nate says. “Where’s your car?”

Brad points to a motorcycle and Nate snorts. “I always knew you’d be waiting to call in that debt.” Brad’s not sure he understands. Nate shakes his head like he’s clearing it and says, “Come on, I’ll give you a ride back to base.”

Brad looks up at the sky. “Not quite ready to go yet.”

Nate stares at him like he’s thinking hard. His openness is suddenly not so open. Brad doesn’t know what’s happening in this exchange really. Nate cocks his head and says, “Let’s go for a walk then.”

They end up walking down the beach. It’s late. The palm trees dotted along the edge of the sand are black silhouettes against a humid red sky.

There’s something unfinished between them. This is probably the world trying to work that out for them. Brad’s not sure he’s ready. He doesn’t know if he ever will be. And yet, he’s the one who kisses Nate first.

He’s turned away, staring at the dark waves as they crash upon the shore. Brad says, “Nate,” and he turns perfectly into Brad’s kiss. He doesn’t fight it. His hands come up to frame Brad’s face, mouth hungry and desperate against his. Brad remembers this feeling. This heady crazy feeling. The thing that made that kiss against some soccer mom’s minivan better than some of the best sex he’s had. He’d like to blame it on not getting laid very often in the last year, but that wouldn’t be fair to himself. He’s not some out-of-control teenager.

They sink to the sand, mouths clicking wetly as they slide together and apart. Nate’s tongue is in his mouth, and then it’s trailing down his jawbone, over his pulse, swirling in the dip of his collarbone. Brad breathes like he’s just come up for air. He finds Nate’s ass, squeezing and kneading the cheeks, long fingers sliding between his thighs to push up at his balls through the denim. Nate moans and bites at his shoulder.

“This can’t end well,” he says, raggedly.

“Should stop,” Brad replies, still rubbing his fingers back and forth over the seam of Nate’s jeans.

“I hope you’re speaking in the short term, because I was speaking in the short term.”

Brad doesn’t know what the hell he means until Nate is yanking him up and saying things like sand everywhere and freezing his balls off and wanting to see Brad naked. Brad can get with the short term.

*

The next morning he sits in the passenger seat of Nate’s car with a borrowed pair of sunglasses, rubbing at his temples. They stop off at the one Jamba Juice in town before driving back to Brad’s motorcycle. He doesn’t feel quite human until the entire smoothie is gone. Nate finds it endlessly amusing. It’s not awkard. Maybe it should be. Nate hasn’t asked any questions, or made any demands, or really said anything about the fact that he took Brad home and made him come three times. It was not a smart move by any means, and they didn't go about it brilliantly either. Somehow, unlike five years ago, he's not scared shitless by a drunken mistake.

Fuck drunkenness. He would’ve done it anyway.


End file.
